Essays on law, leadership, technology, and "things" – and arts, culture, intellectual property, and commons – and entrepreneurship and innovation – and higher education – and Pittsburgh and urbanism. One law professor's views of the world.

About the author

I have been posting at madisonian.net since 2004. From 2003 to 2011, I also wrote at Pittsblog, about regional economic development and the re-emergence of one particularly interesting city and region: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh-themed posts will appear here from time to time.

I publish a related calendar of academic events in intellectual property and information technology law and policy at IP and IT Conferences.

Recent Tweets

@FrankPasquale IP-based market-driven innovation becomes the exception not the rule. Has IP policy been upside down for decades?
3 days ago

The underlying insight of agglomeration economics is that clustering people and firms leads to positive spillovers. The field is best known as an account of urban development — of cities, among other things, but it is conceptually related to some standard law-and-economics tools whose application to IP is well-known: network effects, for example.

One could, I think, apply agglomeration economics directly to IP. The toolkit supplied by agglomeration economics, particularly in its early forms (prior to 1980, more or less) includes some things that standard law-and-economic analysis doesn’t provide, at least not in any rich form: a full inquiry into the sources and effects of individual behavior (contrasted with the assumption that individuals are rational decisionmakers, behaviorally constrained or otherwise), an interest in the dynamics of clustered or agglomerated markets, rather than their static costs and benefits, and specific attention to supply-side considerations (the sources and natures of products and services that serve as inputs into industrial production), in addition to demand for outputs.

What might be learned? “Gains from agglomeration” appear in some clustered markets or communities (speaking of clusters of people, or firms, or products and/or services), and fail to appear in others. That means that exogenous shocks to those markets (shifts in demand, technological shifts, a change in available resources) may be more or less destabilizing and new equilibria may be more or less difficult to achieve. Market actors in agglomerated economies may be better positioned to adapt — or less so — and therefore may be more or less motivated to demand compensatory changes in the law. The histories of various IP industries (music, film, publishing, chemicals, pharma) might be examined as examples and illustrations of more and less successful adaptation by differently agglomerated market actors.